Counting on Billionaires .....not

[Ichingcarpenter]

Philanthrocapitalists like George Soros want us to believe they can remedy the economic misery that they themselves create.



Philanthrocapitalism is the latest “great white hope” of international development. Unlike traditional philanthropists, who were content to write checks for good causes, “philanthrocapitalists” like Bill Gates and George Soros have supposedly transformed development aid by infusing it with the business principles of innovation, efficiency, and enterprise.

Michael Green and Matthew Bishop celebrate this transformation in their best-selling book, Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World and Why We Should Let Them. Bishop and Green argue that philanthrocapitalism is a “new social contract,” in which increasing inequality is to be accepted in exchange for “the rich regarding their surplus wealth as the property of the many, and themselves as trustees whose duty it is to administer it for the common good.”

Should the rich not be sufficiently generous, they warn, “they risk provoking the public into a political backlash against the economic system that allowed them to become so wealthy.” This danger is well understood by “the leading beneficiaries of the winner-takes-all society, worry increasingly about the political risks of growing inequality and are concluding that philanthropy may be one of the best ways to manage those risks.”

In a characteristically amusing and suggestive metaphor, Slavoj Žižek has likened this ideological strategy to the phenomenon of chocolate laxatives: each presents the cause of the problem — chocolate constipates, capitalism impoverishes — as the solution to its own pathological symptoms. Žižek’s favored example is Soros: speculator, philanthropist, and one of the wealthiest men in the world.

Soros is notorious for making vast profits by precipitating the financial destruction of entire economies. In 1992, he forced the United Kingdom out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and into recession by shorting sterling, making an estimated $1 billion in a single day. He has also been blamed for triggering the East Asian financial crisis in 1997 by short-selling the Thai baht and the Malay ringgit, and was accused of playing a role in speculative attacks on the yen in 2013.

But liberal elites around the world laud Soros for channelling large quantities of his dubiously earned wealth into philanthropic projects — primarily through his Open Society Foundation, which promotes democracy, free markets, and economic development around the world.

The paradox of the chocolate laxative certainly applies in this case. Strangely enough, however, Soros appeals to an even more lurid scatological metaphor to describe his own activities. In his book, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, Soros reflects on his dual role as speculator and philanthropist, noting that “sometimes I felt like a giant digestive tract, taking in money at one end and pushing it out at the other.”

The psychoanalytic ramifications of this phrase would have kept Freud happy for a lifetime. But they need not detain us here. Instead, it can serve as the starting point for a parable of philanthrocapitalism.

In the world of high finance, Soros is famous for his concept of “reflexivity,” according to which market transactions impact the price signals to which they respond. Meanwhile, in his philanthropic work, Soros emphasizes the constant danger of “unintended consequences.” He does not, however, consider the possibility of a relationship between these two dimensions.


more

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/george-soros-philanthrocapitalism-millennium-villages/

[daleanime]

1. K&R....

[Demeter]

2. Of course the billionaires know better than us--after all, who has our money?

I'm not convinced that the "French Solution" wouldn't increase general health and happiness and prosperity better than any "management" by the most successful thieves in history....